In a world of steamships and Progress, no one who sails due south across the Wild Sea ever returns.
No one knows why.
Dale Mortensen intends to solve the mystery. With the help of an old sailor and a reformed playboy searching for his missing sweetheart, he locates a captain and crew ambitious—not to mention crazy—enough to undertake the journey across the Wild Sea.
The Infinity and her crew sail south, but the truth of what really lies on the other side of the horizon is more amazing—and terrifying—than anything they can imagine.
It’s the adventure of a lifetime—and it may just get Dale and his friends killed.
Find out how this Young Adult steampunk adventure unfolds chapter-by-chapter every Thursday! Click here to start from the beginning. Or if you want to read it at your own pace, buy the ebook for $6.99 from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords or Sony, or get it as a trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Book Depository.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HORIZON
E. R. PASKEY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SIX WEEKS LATER, DALE SAT IN the dining hall on the Platform, picking at his lunch. He was halfway through a nine-day stint, and more than ready to go back to Rift City. When the noise level around him dipped oddly before rising again, he glanced up from his plate to see what had happened—and promptly did a double-take. Raphael? Here?
His best friend stood in the doorway, his expression halfway between cheerful and determined. He seemed to be searching the room.
Bemused, Dale raised a hand and waved him over.
Raphael got himself a plate and lowered himself onto the bench across from Dale with a grin. “Hello, my friend.”
“Raphael. What are you doing here?” Dale shook his head. “I thought they were sending you to the Mining District after you got out.”
“Oh, they did.” His smile sharpened. “Apparently, one can be transferred to the Platform if one pisses off the right individual. Who knew?”
Dale regarded him with fond exasperation. “All right. I’ll bite. Who’d you piss off?”
“Ah, my friend, that is where things become interesting.” Raphael kept his tone light, but it was steel underneath. “Corwin Hamper.”
Elena’s suitor? Dale froze mid-chew. “You’re joking,” he said through a mouthful of food.
Raphael held a hand up, solemnly shaking his head. “Would you believe he was part of the rescue squad that pulled us off the beach the night we arrived?”
Dale just barely managed to hide his wince. “What makes you so sure he’s responsible for your transfer?”
“Come now, Dale.” Raphael gave him an impatient look, as though he was being particularly slow. “The timing, it is too perfect.”
It was Dale’s turn to hold up a hand. “I’m not saying it’s not true. I just asked if you have any proof.” He waited a beat. When Raphael remained silent, he prodded, “Do you?”
“It is probably best if I keep that to myself,” said Raphael at last.
“Suit yourself.” Shrugging, Dale picked up his other sandwich. He did not say anything else; it was not necessary. Raphael, he had learned, hated awkward silences. He would either change the subject and speak of something else, or he would give voice to whatever lay heaviest on him.
After a moment, Raphael said, “You have not asked the obvious question.”
Dale suppressed a grin. “What’s that?”
“If she prefers him.”
That brought Dale up short. He looked at his friend, noting that his cheerfulness had given way to something that smacked suspiciously of despondency. He considered a moment. “Didn’t think I had to.”
Raphael stared at him, visibly jarred.
Dale took advantage of his friend’s apparent speechlessness to continue, “You became a sailor to find this girl, Raph. You survived the Rift and a shipwreck. I didn’t think you’d let a little thing like another man stand in your way now.”
“I—I—” Raphael looked dazed, but it quickly transformed into a half-amazed, half-smug smile. “I did survive the Rift. And the shipwreck.”
“Yep. Bet old what’s-his-face can’t say that.” Dale waved his sandwich. “Didn’t you tell me once that women appreciate grand gestures? If that’s not a grand gesture, I’ll jump off the top of the Platform.”
He was not expecting Raphael to throw back his head and laugh. “So you were listening.”
“Maybe.” Dale twitched a shoulder in a shrug.
Raphael clapped him on the shoulder. “You are absolutely correct my friend. Elena is much smarter than ‘old what’s-his-face’ gives her credit.”
“Mortensen.” They both looked up as Hawk dropped listlessly onto the bench beside Dale. His green eyes sharpened, however, as he took in Raphael. “Who’s your friend?”
Dale introduced them and recognition flitted across Hawk’s bearded face. “You’re the one who got into a fistfight with a Family Scion over a girl yesterday.”
“That would be me, yes,” said Raphael, pleasantly.
“Wouldn’t make a habit of that if I were you.” Hawk shook his head. “They don’t take kindly to it.”
“You got into a fistfight with him?” asked Dale, incredulous.
Raphael shrugged. “News travels quickly.”
Hawk picked up his sandwich. “How’d you even meet that girl? From what little Mortensen says, you haven’t been anywhere but the Hospital.”
Raphael glanced sideways at Dale, who shrugged. “That part of the story was yours to tell.”
“I see.” Leaning back in his seat, Raphael gave Hawk an abridged version of the story, though Dale privately thought it was most people’s idea of the complete tale.
“I knew Mortensen was crazy, deliberately setting out to sail the Wild Sea,” said Hawk at the end, shaking his head again, “but I didn’t realize you’d banded together with a bunch of equally crazy loonies.”
The whistle blew, signaling the end of lunch break, and whatever Raphael planned to say in reply got lost in the shuffle of bodies toward the doors. Instead, he flashed Dale a bright, slightly manic smile and disappeared to rejoin his new work crew.
~oOo~
HIS friend being the Platform’s newest addition meant Dale saw little of Raphael for that first week. Lunch the first day had been a one-off; Reffet knew Dale and Raphael were shipmates. That at least was how Raphael explained it when he came looking for Dale after his evening meal toward the end of the week.
That, however, was not Raphael’s primary concern. The bulk of his thoughts revolved first and foremost around Elena, but, to Dale’s astonishment, among the subjects orbiting that main concern were Peabody and the dirigible.
“I did not want to believe you when you told me no one except Mr. Riley had spoken of the dirigible, but you were correct.” Raphael sat in a chair in Dale’s cabin, his feet propped up on the frame along Dale’s bunk.
Dale himself lay stretched out on his bunk; his cabin-mates were all at a card game. He merely grunted at this. Personally, he wished the dratted contraption had never been invented.
“Riley came to see me when the dragon finally discharged me, you see.” A thoughtful frown settled over Raphael’s brown features. “For something that is supposed to be a rumor, it is very curious that no one speaks of it, is it not?”
“Didn’t Belly tell you not to talk about it?”
“Oh, he did. But he also said he thought Riley could be trusted.”
That drew Dale’s attention. He stiffened, narrowing his eyes at his friend. “What? Belly said that?” He knew Raphael and Belly were working in close quarters. He had initially thought that was a good thing; Belly might be able to temper some of Raphael’s hot-blooded impatience and keep him from getting into worse trouble. Now I’m not so sure.
“He did, provided I kept him informed.” Raphael lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “So when Riley requested that I tell him everything I know, I complied.”
Fantastic. Dale slung an arm over his eyes. Just what we need—the two of them poking into things that don’t matter and might get them into trouble. “Who cares what happened to the dirigible?” he asked irritably, when Raphael started off on another tangent.
Taken aback, his dark-haired friend stared at him. “What?” His feet dropped to the deck with a little thud and he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Think of the possibilities, my friend! The dirigible could be our ticket back through the Rift!”
“You don’t know that, Raph.” Dale sat up, narrowly avoiding banging his head into the underside of the bunk above him. “All Riley has is rumors—he doesn’t even know if the dirigible made it to shore in one piece.”
“That is no matter.” Raphael cut a hand through the air. “The most important thing is whether or not Captain Peabody still lives. Should it be required, he will have the knowledge to rebuild his creation in here.” He tapped his temple with one long finger.
“Nobody knows for certain if he survived either.” Dale narrowed his eyes. “Remember, Raphael, the fact that he even made it through the Rift is a rumor—and an unsubstantiated one at that!”
Raphael stared at him. In the cabin’s dim light, his dark eyes looked even darker—and unhappy. “You are not even curious?”
“No.”
“You have absolutely no desire to attempt to return to our world?”
“Not on that blasted flying contraption.”
Raphael’s lips tightened, as though he was restraining himself from saying something he thought he might regret. After a second, he said, “You are my friend, Dale, and I would rather venture into these waters with a friend at my side. Belly is a good man, but you and I have been through a great deal together over the last few years.”
“It’s a fool’s errand, Raph,” said Dale stubbornly. “I want nothing to do with that thing. You’d be best to put it out of your head.”
“In that case…” Raphael unfolded himself from the chair and stood looking down at Dale, straight and slim. “I believe we are done.”
“Finally,” muttered Dale.
Scowling fiercely, Raphael departed the cabin and banged the door shut behind him.
In the silence he left behind, Dale flopped back on his bunk. The disappointment etched all over his friend’s features stung. It is a fool’s errand, he argued with himself. Why bother with it?
A very small voice in the back of his mind pointed out that there were plenty of people who had told him sailing the Wild Sea was a fool’s errand as well—and it had not stopped him.
Dale ignored this voice. If Peabody is alive, how come nobody’s heard of him? All Raph is going to do is get his hopes up. Rolling over, he did his best to squash a niggling sensation that felt suspiciously like guilt.
~oOo~
DALE and Raphael did not speak much over the next few months. Their duties being what they were, and the Platform as large as it was, this was not difficult to accomplish. Their paths did not usually cross on a good day, and now neither man went out of his way to seek the other out. They still shared a room at Mrs. Yunker’s on their furloughs, but they did not speak and Raphael was never there for meals. While Dale was perfectly capable of holding a grudge—tucking his head down and carrying on with his life as though his friend did not exist—it was something unusual for Raphael to move through his days in frigid silence and avoidance.
“You’re bein’ foolish, lad,” said Belly bluntly, after the first week.
“And you’re encouraging the madness,” shot back Dale coolly.
“There’s nothin’ wrong with wantin’ to go home now that we’ve solved the mystery of the Wild Sea.”
Dale shook his head. “I’m not listening to this, Belly.”
Belly gave him a long, level look. “Have it yer way then, lad.”
~oOo~
HIS friendship with Raphael on the rocks, Dale threw himself into learning Demascenes with renewed vigor. Whenever he was back in Rift City, he faithfully attended Professor Hodge’s language classes. He and Naya eventually banded together and formed a study group out of sheer necessity. He was still behind everyone else, and she struggled with mapping sounds to characters. Another benefit for him was that she made copies of her notes for the classes he was unable to attend.
Within a few weeks, he was a regular fixture at the flat Naya shared with her grandmother and he had learned that she was indeed a superb cook. When he ate her food, he could almost imagine he was back in Falconcrest at his aunt’s table. He repaid her by fixing things around the flat.
Mrs. Azlynn was a wizened old woman with a permanent hunch in her spine and sharp brown eyes that missed nothing. Her first comment to Naya after she introduced them was, “Well, he’s certainly tall enough.”
Naya and Dale had both blushed.
Mrs. Azlynn took in sewing projects when she could get them to pass the time during the day, and she was always happy to see Dale. She had, he soon learned, married a displaced sailor, but had no love for the water herself.
It was not long before Dale found himself completely besotted with the dark-skinned girl. He liked to listen to Naya talk, to watch her smile or roll her eyes as she relayed an anecdote or a story. Sometimes, when he watched her and her grandmother bicker over something as simple as how much flour to put in gravy, or tell him a back-and-forth story about some funny or mysterious event that had happened in Rift City, he imagined an old, wrinkled Naya sitting in a rocking chair next to an equally old and wrinkled version of himself.
The first time that particular thought wended its way through his brain, it caught Dale off-guard. He did not often think about being old and gray. Nor had he ever given much consideration to who might be there with him. His crush on Belle had been strong, but mercifully short-lived. He had imagined smiles and conversations about books and the sea, and any other topics that struck their fancy.
He had never gotten the smiles—at least not until right before his departure—and he had certainly never gotten the conversation.
But with Naya…when she smiled teasingly at him—or shyly—or better, when she gave him a full-blown honest grin, Dale felt a peculiar stirring sensation in his chest. It was almost as though his heart seemed torn between skipping a beat, pounding faster, or leaping for joy and had to settle for something in the middle. And sometimes—more frequently these days, he had to admit—he left her home with heavy steps and an equally peculiar ache in his heart.
In hindsight, he supposed Raphael could have diagnosed him sooner, but Dale eventually forced himself to put that nameless ache to words and discovered that he did not want to leave their flat. When the evenings grew late and he picked up his hat to depart, a large part of him—and growing larger by the week, he realized—wanted to stay.
Naya and her grandmother had begun to feel like home.
That realization did not startle Dale so much as it shifted something deep inside him. In that moment, he understood how Raphael felt about Elena—and why he had been so desperate to find her.
Dale had been operating a piping station when that little revelation hit and nearly overflowed a vat. He caught it in time, but received a head shake from Reffet nonetheless.
Hawk ribbed him about it later. He had a good-natured sort of humor, when it managed to surface above the perpetual air of sad resignation that clung to his spare frame with sticky fingers, and he had been close enough to see the foreman’s reaction.
At dinner that night, he nudged Dale with his shoulder. “Reffet gave you a bit of grief today, but don’t worry. Happens to everyone.” He tipped his head in the direction of a short, pale man with gray hair. “Overflowed a vat twice in one week a year or two ago.”
Dale chewed, swallowed, and shook his head. “How’d he manage that?”
Hawk looked down at his plate with a wry smile. “His son was pretty ill.”
What is his point? Dale raised his eyebrows in a question.
Hawk rolled his eyes heavenward, as though asking, Why me? “Point is, Mortensen, it only ever happens when a man is careless, or else when he’s got too much on his mind.” One corner of his mouth tilted up. “We all know you’re hardly the careless type, so that naturally leaves something on your mind.”
Ah. Dale supposed that made sense. Shifting his weight on the bench, he nodded tersely and returned to his dinner. He figured Hawk would leave it at that; the man tended not to stick his nose into things that were none of his business.
He figured wrong. Hawk’s next words glued him immobile to his seat.
“Judging by the way you’ve been drifting around the Platform with that half-loony look on your face, I’d say there’s a girl involved.”
A wave of heat started at Dale’s neck and rolled up to suffuse his face, turning even the tips of his ears a solid brick red.
Hawk nodded sagely at this evidence of discomfort and returned to his plate. “That’s what I thought.” He sounded odd; like he was torn between amusement and a strange, wistful sadness.
Clearing his throat before he took another bite, Dale resolved to check his reflection the next time he encountered a vat of water. “I don’t actually look half-loony, do I?”
Hawk’s parting words—too casually spoken to be anything but a painful truth wrapped in a veneer of levity—froze Dale to his seat for the second time. “Fair warning, Mortensen. They don’t let a man off the Platform just because he gets married.”
Married? Completely flabbergasted, Dale stared unseeing at the opposite wall until the whistle blew, signifying the end of dinner.
Hawk’s words bounced around inside Dale’s head the rest of the week. He found himself mulling them over at strange hours. Did he want to marry Naya? Was that where he was headed?
We are friends. Of that much, Dale was certain. She had saved his life—so she claimed—when he was a mere stranger, and now they were good friends. It should have been enough, but somehow…it was not. He wanted her to look at him the way his Aunt Helen looked at his uncle—despite Uncle Liev’s flaws.
Dale was half-afraid Naya held his heart without knowing it, and began to wish she would return the favor.
He would have liked to talk to Raphael about it. But every time he considered approaching his friend and attempting to breach the wall they had built between them, something stopped him cold. He did not believe there was any point investigating what had happened to Peabody and his infernal machine—and Raphael could not get past it.
Dale therefore resigned himself to muddling along as best he could, and life settled into a routine that was almost comfortable.
He should have known it was only a lull in the storm.
Find out how this Young Adult steampunk adventure unfolds chapter-by-chapter every Thursday! Or if you want to keep reading right now, buy the ebook for $6.99 from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords or Sony, or get it as a trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Book Depository.
Copyright © 2013 E. R. Paskey